Leon Van Speybroeck
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Leon Van Speybroeck
Leon P. Van Speybroeck ( Wichita (Kansas), August 27, 1935 - Newton, Massachusetts, December 25, 2002) was an American astronomer who served as Telescope Scientist for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which was launched into space aboard the Space Shuttle ''Columbia'' in 1999. Van Speybroek designed the mirrors that made possible its spectacular X-ray images of nearby and remote celestial objects, including comets, exploding stars, jets of gas spewing from nearby black holes, and powerful quasars more than 10 billion light years from Earth. The data from Chandra prompted new discoveries about the evolution of stars and galaxies, the nature of the black holes, dark matter, and the shape and dimensions of the universe. Contributions to Chandra X-Ray Observatory The Chandra mirrors designed by Van Speybroeck are the smoothest and most precise ever made, with tolerances measured within just a few atoms. The telescope's angular resolution, at 0.5 arcsecond, is ten times better th ...
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Wichita (Kansas)
Wichita ( ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Sedgwick County. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 397,532. The Wichita metro area had a population of 647,610 in 2020. It is located in south-central Kansas on the Arkansas River. Wichita began as a trading post on the Chisholm Trail in the 1860s and was incorporated as a city in 1870. It became a destination for cattle drives traveling north from Texas to Kansas railroads, earning it the nickname "Cowtown".Miner, Prof. Craig (Wichita State Univ. Dept. of History), ''Wichita: The Magic City'', Wichita Historical Museum Association, Wichita, KS, 1988Howell, Angela and Peg Vines, ''The Insider's Guide to Wichita'', Wichita Eagle & Beacon Publishing, Wichita, KS, 1995 Wyatt Earp served as a police officer in Wichita for around one year before going to Dodge City. In the 1920s and 1930s, businessmen and aeronautical engineers established aircraft manufacturing compani ...
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Nobel Prize In Physics
) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "MDCCCXXXIII" above, followed by (smaller) "OB•" then "MDCCCXCVI" below. , awarded_for = Outstanding contributions for humankind in the field of Physics , presenter = Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , location = Stockholm, Sweden , date = , reward = 9 million Swedish kronor (2017) , year = 1901 , holder_label = Most recently awarded to , holder = Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger , most_awards = John Bardeen (2) , website nobelprize.org, previous = 2021 , year2=2022, main=2022, next=2023 The Nobel Prize in Physics is a yearly award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions for humankind in the field of physics. It ...
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Hubble Constant
Hubble's law, also known as the Hubble–Lemaître law, is the observation in physical cosmology that galaxies are moving away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance. In other words, the farther they are, the faster they are moving away from Earth. The velocity of the galaxies has been determined by their redshift, a shift of the light they emit toward the red end of the visible spectrum. Hubble's law is considered the first observational basis for the expansion of the universe, and today it serves as one of the pieces of evidence most often cited in support of the Big Bang model. The motion of astronomical objects due solely to this expansion is known as the Hubble flow. It is described by the equation , with ''H''0 the constant of proportionality—the Hubble constant—between the "proper distance" ''D'' to a galaxy, which can change over time, unlike the comoving distance, and its speed of separation ''v'', i.e. the derivative of proper distance with respect t ...
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American Astronomical Society
The American Astronomical Society (AAS, sometimes spoken as "double-A-S") is an American society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. The primary objective of the AAS is to promote the advancement of astronomy and closely related branches of science, while the secondary purpose includes enhancing astronomy education and providing a political voice for its members through lobbying and grassroots activities. Its current mission is to enhance and share humanity's scientific understanding of the universe as a diverse and inclusive astronomical community. History The society was founded in 1899 through the efforts of George Ellery Hale. The constitution of the group was written by Hale, George Comstock, Edward Morley, Simon Newcomb and Edward Charles Pickering. These men, plus four others, were the first Executive Council of the society; Newcomb was the first president. The initial membership was 114. The AAS name of the so ...
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Bruno Rossi Prize
The Bruno Rossi Prize is awarded annually by the High Energy Astrophysics division of the American Astronomical Society "for a significant contribution to High Energy Astrophysics, with particular emphasis on recent, original work". Named after astrophysicist Bruno Rossi, the prize is awarded with a certificate and a gift of USD $500, and was first awarded in 1985 to William R. Forman and Christine Jones Forman "for pioneering work in the study of X-ray emission from early type galaxies". It has been awarded 32 times. In 2010, the prize was awarded to William B. Atwood, Peter Michelson and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team "for enabling, through the development of the Large Area Telescope, new insights into neutron stars, supernova remnants, cosmic rays, binary systems, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray bursts". In 2013, the prize was awarded to Roger W. Romani of Leland Stanford Junior University and Alice Harding of Goddard Space Flight Center for their work in ...
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Fellow Of The American Physical Society
The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics. The following lists are divided chronologically by the year of designation. * List of American Physical Society Fellows (1921–1971) * List of American Physical Society Fellows (1972–1997) * List of American Physical Society Fellows (1998–2010) * List of American Physical Society Fellows (2011–) The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics. The following list includes those fellows selected since 2011. 2011 * Nikolaus Adams * Claudia ... References {{reflist ...
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Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope (often referred to as HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versatile, renowned both as a vital research tool and as a public relations boon for astronomy. The Hubble telescope is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble and is one of NASA's Great Observatories. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) selects Hubble's targets and processes the resulting data, while the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) controls the spacecraft. Hubble features a mirror, and its five main instruments observe in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to capture extremely high-resolution images with substantially lower background light than ground-based telescopes. It has recorded some of the most detaile ...
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Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement
The Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) is an optical correction instrument designed and built by NASA. It was created to correct the spherical aberration of the Hubble Space Telescopes primary mirror, which incorrectly focused light upon the Faint Object Camera (FOC), Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS), and Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) instruments. It was flown via shuttle to the telescope in the servicing mission STS-61, on December 2, 1993, and successfully installed over a period of eleven days. Origin Once it had been identified in 1990 that the primary mirror in the recently launched Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was defective due to it having been ground to the wrong shape, engineers at NASA came under immense pressure to fix the problem. The incorrect shape of the mirror introduced severe spherical aberration, a flaw in which light reflecting off the edge of a mirror focuses on a different point from the light reflecting off its cent ...
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Einstein Observatory
Einstein Observatory (HEAO-2) was the first fully imaging X-ray telescope put into space and the second of NASA's three High Energy Astrophysical Observatories. Named HEAO B before launch, the observatory's name was changed to honor Albert Einstein upon its successfully attaining orbit. Project conception and design The HEAO Program, High Energy Astronomy Observatory (HEAO) program originated in the late 1960's within the Astronomy Missions Board at NASA, which recommended the launch of a series of satellite observatories dedicated to high-energy astronomy. In 1970, NASA requested proposals for experiments to fly on these observatories, and a team organized by Riccardo Giacconi, Herbert Gursky, George W. Clark, Elihu Boldt, and Robert Novick responded in October 1970 with a proposal for an x-ray telescope. NASA approved four missions in the HEAO program, with the x-ray telescope planned to be the third mission. One of the three missions of the HEAO program was cancelled in F ...
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Space Observatory
A space telescope or space observatory is a telescope in outer space used to observe astronomical objects. Suggested by Lyman Spitzer in 1946, the first operational telescopes were the American Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, OAO-2 launched in 1968, and the Soviet Orion 1 ultraviolet telescope aboard space station Salyut 1 in 1971. Space telescopes avoid the filtering and distortion ( scintillation) of electromagnetic radiation which they observe, and avoid light pollution which ground-based observatories encounter. They are divided into two types: Satellites which map the entire sky (astronomical survey), and satellites which focus on selected astronomical objects or parts of the sky and beyond. Space telescopes are distinct from Earth imaging satellites, which point toward Earth for satellite imaging, applied for weather analysis, espionage, and other types of information gathering. History Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler in 1837 discussed the advantages of ...
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Uhuru (satellite)
Uhuru was the first satellite launched specifically for the purpose of X-ray astronomy. It was also known as the X-ray Explorer Satellite, SAS-A (for Small Astronomy Satellite A, being first of the three-spacecraft SAS series), SAS 1, or Explorer 42. The space observatory, observatory was launched on December 12, 1970 into an initial orbit of about 560 km apogee, 520 km perigee, 3 degrees inclination, with a period of 96 minutes. The mission ended in March 1973. Uhuru was a scanning mission, with a spin period of ~12 minutes. It performed the first comprehensive survey of the entire sky for X-ray sources, with a sensitivity of about 0.001 times the intensity of the Crab nebula. Objectives The main objectives of the mission were: * To survey the sky for cosmic X-ray sources in the 2–20 keV range to a limiting sensitivity of 1.5 × 10−18 joule/(cm2-sec), 5 × 10−4 the flux from the Crab Nebula * To determine discrete source locations with a precision of a few square ...
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